This a transcript of the UIE Podcast "Stephen Anderson on Seductive Interactions" available at
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Jared Spool: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of "SpoolCast." Today I have Stephen Anderson with us. He is a consultant who's based out of Dallas and he spends a lot of time thinking about user experience design and how teams work.
I saw him at the IA Summit last year talking about how the things that games do to keep players engaged can be put into applications and other types of designs, and I was just blown away by this. He's going to be speaking at our UIE Web App Masters Tour, which is going to be this spring in San Diego, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Seattle.
I'm very happy to have him with us today. Stephen, how are you? Thanks for joining us.
Stephen Anderson: I'm doing great, glad to be here.
Jared: Excellent. Now, at the IA Summit last year, you started talking about a deck of cards. You're in the card producing business now, aren't you?
Stephen: Yeah, I don't know how I went from web design to producing a product which involves a lot of investment up front, but yep. That's what I'm working on.
Jared: These aren't normal playing cards. You're not going to use these for the Friday night poker game. These are design playing cards.
Stephen: Correct. In fact, what each card has is a principle or an idea from fields like Game Mechanics, like you mentioned, or from Behavioral Economics or just Psychology. Things that we've either known for years. For example, of a lot of the Behavioral Economic stuff goes back 30 years, to recent findings in neuroscience and what gets the brain's attention and why surprise is effective.
So, basically each card represents one of these ideas and suggests ways we can apply that to websites and web applications.
Jared: You call these cards "Mental Notes," right?
Stephen: Correct.
Jared: Yeah, so are you thinking that you might have a team member hold out these cards face down. You pick one and you say, "OK, today we're going to design for social proof?"
Stephen: Not quite that. There's actually a phrase. What we're thinking about is what's the business context? What are you trying to accomplish with these? In the presentation I talked about user needs, I talked about business needs and, of course, satisfying both.
The context here is "let's put out a business objective." For example, we want more people to register on the site would be the business objective. So the way you would use these cards is you would shuffle them, put them face down in front of you and you would pull a card from the top, and it might be social proof, like you mentioned.
So, the exercise would be, "OK, how can we use social proof to increase registration on our site?" Then you would spend 10-15 minutes brainstorming. The first few ideas would be pretty familiar things like, "let's have testimonials," but if you spend more time with the idea, for example, social proof. We tend to follow the patterns of similar others in new or unfamiliar situations. If you really brainstorm on that as a team, you might come up with some clever and creative ways to demonstrate or show social proof. One site that comes to mind is an anti-Outlook email campaign that was going around.
The entire wallpaper behind their message was avatars from Twitter. Every time someone was tweeting about their campaign, they would pull the avatar and have this on-going animation in the background. It was just this big wall of avatars.
Again, that was a very clever way to demonstrate social proof, that there are lots of people participating in this campaign. So, that's the idea, and then you would spend 15 minutes with that card, exhaust all the ideas, and go onto the next card and see where the brainstorming takes you.
Jared: This is really interesting to me because I think brainstorming is something where if you don't have some sort of outside stimuli like these cards, you just reiterate the same old ideas over and over and over again.
Stephen: Yeah, certainly. In fact, what I find is that this gives it some structure. A lot of these ideas aren't new. If people have read some of the best-sellers like "Persuasion," by Cialdini, or "Predictably Irrational," or a lot of these books that are out.
Jared: That's Dan Ariely's book, right?
Stephen: Yes, correct. He writes for Harvard regularly. If you've read a lot of these books or these articles, then the ideas aren't new, but we tend to forget them. We tend to switch over to "I'm designing a website. I'm designing a web app now."
We focus on things like visual design, usability or the information architecture and we forget about, "Oh yeah, there was that thing about gifting or curiosity or the peak-end rule." This is really a way to apply intention or a way to intentionally remind people to use some of these, or try to leverage these.
These are ideas about human behavior and how humans respond to different ideas or different stimulus. So my idea is why aren't we applying these to web design? We're applying them to marketing, to retail, to interpersonal relationships, dating.
A lot of these ideas are nothing new, but I think we're just now reaching the point where we're thinking more consciously about how can I apply something like recognition over recall to web design?
Jared: I think that this is really quite interesting, this idea of using these types of tools to stimulate our design process. Is it only in the brainstorming phase that you think you'd use this, or are there other places in the process where you could see these things being used?
Stephen: Brainstorming initially or in the evaluative process. What I think is this deck is going to help a lot of people do is take their site, which is maybe pretty good, maybe they've run it through a usability lab, or done some testing of some sort and it's good, but it's not emotional, it's not engaging, it's not playful or fun.
This will actually help businesses and help folks take their products to the next level. In fact, that's been a big theme among all of the presentations that I've done over the last five years, is really how do we advance from a site that works fine, is usable, to something that's more convenient, more pleasurable, more meaningful...things like that.
What I'm actually doing, I have a workshop where I actually use these cards. One of the activities we do is we actually take a site that's pretty good, doesn't have any problems with it, but it could be a lot more persuasive, a lot more inspirational, a lot more effective. Using these cards, we identify different ways it could be improved and made more emotional.
The analogy I like to use a lot is the presentation that these came from was about seductive interactions. When I talk about seduction, the definition of seduction is deliberately enticing a person to engage in some sort of behavior. There's a last part there, frequently sexual in nature, but I just cross off that and focus on the first half of that, enticing a person to engage in a behavior.
One example I like to draw, is think of these people who are really good people, they're really kind-hearted, but wow, they just can't relate to someone else and so they need to work on their social skills or they need to work on being better listeners. When I talk about seduction, seduction would apply to that person.
I think a lot of our websites are that geek or nerd who is really good, really nice, but doesn't know how to relate to other people. So hopefully these cards will take things to the next level, or these ideas will help make things a lot more interesting, a lot more fun.
Jared: [laughs] How to win a date with your users.
Stephen: Exactly, exactly. In fact, I literally say we're talking about getting to first base. When I use that phrase, I think one distinction you have to draw is the end goal isn't a one-night-stand. The end goal is life-long devotion. That's what we want from our users; we want people to fall in love with our product.
It's actually interesting the origins of this idea and this focus for me actually began... I was working on two products that were pretty good, but there was a little bit of a learning curve. You had to play with the product a bit before you really figured out why it was valuable, or why it was useful. And both of these products were ones that were public websites. One was a website, actually. The other was a software application you download and install.
And, with the website in particular, you needed to spend a few minutes to see the value in it. Attention is so scarce today that people spend 30 seconds on something, and they might not see the value or see why it could be useful to them in those 30 seconds.
So my focus started shifting from the product itself to that initial engagement, that initial interaction, and how do we make that first experience a lot more seductive, so people stick around long enough to see that you really do have something worthwhile here?
Jared: That's really interesting to me, because it is a challenge that we have, that we have to make things look appealing. Even if they're things that people know they'll have to do eventually, we want them to sort of look forward to doing it, right? So, something that might be considered boring in some applications, a university admissions form, or a financial aid form. Is there a way to make those experiences more seductive, more intriguing, appealing, to people?
Stephen: Oh, absolutely. In fact, again, going back to real world analogies, think about if you were doing those not with a system online, but with a human. And the human could be very straightforward, very to-the-point, in asking the questions, or that human could be very personable, and maybe crack a joke, or ask you how you are doing, do these things to be more personable.
So really, what I'm saying is, why can't these systems adopt some of those similar ideas? Obviously there's context to factor in, and it's a little bit of a translation process, but I think even the most straightforward tax system or university administration form, like you mentioned, could be more interesting and engaging.
I'm actually working on an article right now for an online magazine, and I take the idea of email, just everyday email, and I say, "How can we make email into a game?" Literally, a game. And using ideas like feedback loops and personal informatics, I talk about how we could see, in stats or in images or pictures how we are doing at the game of email. If we chose, we could see how we're doing relative to our peers who are also playing the game.
That was actually borne out of some personal problems, where I get an avalanche of emails, or what I think is an avalanche, and I still haven't found the magic bullet for dealing with email. Although I've picked up a lot of good tips. And so, one tip I picked up, for example, is never open an email twice. Once you get it, do something with it. Whether it's delete it, archive it, whatever it is, do something with it. And that's a problem I'm guilty of, where I'll open something, I'll star it, I'll come back to it a second time, a third time, before I finally respond.
So, thinking about this in terms of a game, what if we structure it so that when you respond the first time you get ten points. If you close and come back a second time, you get no points. If you come back anytime after that, you start losing points. What if we put in some feedback loops that would actually encourage good behavior? What would the effect be?
Jared: I've often thought that if we added a high score file to Excel and Word that we would increase the gross national productivity rates dramatically, assuming that this high score measured the right thing.
Stephen: That's key, measuring the right thing. That's critical.
Jared: And that's interesting to me. I remember in the IA Summit presentation, you talked about... it was a helpdesk application, I believe, where the goal was to get people within the community to answer questions for each other.
Stephen: Yeah. It was kind of like a Yahoo! Question and answer, but internal to this company. Imagine Yahoo! Questions and Answers plus a heavy social component. And the goal was internal knowledge sharing. If we look at it on paper, it's to share knowledge.
And what's interesting is to compare this tool that was developed internally at this company to the wiki they had licensed a few years earlier. Essentially these tools are the same thing. Share knowledge. You have people leaving the company, and you have knowledge that you want to stick around.
Well, what they rolled out was, I would say applied a lot of these principles that I talk about. Everything from a score and points to scarcity, all these ideas. In fact, they actually had an interesting idea I haven't seen in a lot of applications built for adults. I've actually seen this in kids' games, and it's the idea of scarcity.
Well, with most sites, let's take our Facebooks and our MySpaces and our LinkedIns, the goal there is to add content. They want to do everything possible to get you to add more content. This site, this application, actually took the opposite approach. And if you wanted to add a photo beyond your first one which was free, you had to pay.
You had to pay to add a second photo or a third photo. You could create three groups for free, but if you wanted to create a fourth group or a fifth group, you actually had to earn points, and spend those points to create those groups.
And we might initially think, "OK, putting up those walls, those constraints, would drive people away," but actually, it accomplished the opposite. People suddenly were interacting more with the application, and more with the system, so they could earn the points, so they could deck out their profile, and have five photos in their profile like their friend had.
And it was just interesting to see this work and the stats, which I share in the presentation, were just amazing. In terms of the adoption, the usage, the average number of page views per visit, just incredible stats for an internal knowledge-sharing application, which is what it was.
Jared: Well, because this becomes very competitive, right?
Stephen: Competitive, and just fun. Even things like someone posts a question on something that you're an expert on. Well, if you don't jump in and respond, within a few hours, or definitely within 24 hours, someone else might respond. So you've lost the chance to be the first responder, get the points, or get that recognition.
So it's... I don't know if it's directly competitive, we're not talking about leaderboards and things like that here, but there is that desire for recognition. You know, "I want to be recognized among my peers for having the qualifying response."
So I think it's focusing on things like that, that made the application really brilliant, really successful, even down to the little details, like instead of asking for your age, they actually had a drop down field, and the label said, "I feel like..." and you could put whatever age you feel like.
Jared: [laughs]
Stephen: And I thought that was just a brilliant little detail, so I'm 50, but I actually feel like I'm 35, or whatever it is.
Jared: Yeah. That's very cool. And I'm intrigued by this, because it really does seem to be a way to take something which traditionally is boring, and in some cases if there is sort of an unofficial internal competition, it's for things like just proving you're the smartest person, right?
So in a lot of knowledge-based systems that people use internally, and even in online discussion groups and things like that, there are the people who try and reply to every message, just because that's the only way you can get any sort of measurement out of it. Their answers, whether they're right or wrong, or informed or uninformed, set the tone for the group, and can take a good experience down to a negative experience.
By adding different dimensions here, and different ways to prove that you are being helpful, or being productive, you can move away from some of the traditional mechanisms of just trolling or blasting or any of those types of traditional feedback mechanisms.
Stephen: Yeah, in fact, the phrase I use a lot is, how can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want. And as designers, that's exactly what we're doing when we design the information architecture of something, or we make a button bigger so more people will click on it.
We're building in these nudges, we're building in the structure that people are going to move through, if you want to think about it this way. With the example you brought up, where you get more points the more you do, you end up with spam or people abusing the system.
I'm actually working on an application right now, and we have a feedback area where we talk about collaboration, and we didn't want to encourage excessive posting or excessive useless collaboration or commenting. So we actually display that as kind of a neutral thing. We show you how you're doing relative to the peers.
So did you collaborate less than your peers or more than your peers? And the goal is to be center, or be anchored near the middle. So the feedback loop we said actually encourages you not to be excessive at either end.
Also going back to the enterprise example I mentioned, their currency was this idea of karma. They actually had karma points that you would earn, and you could see your points and spend them on things like groups and photos and other privileges.
But they were very careful not to reveal the formulas, how exactly do you earn points. They would describe generally how you earn karma, but by the time you got reading, it was basically be a good citizen, to contribute content, get feedback. If you don't know the answer but you know someone else who does, connect them. You get points for that.
So they described, in very qualitative ways, how you earn karma and how you get better at this game or this system. But they were not explicit with what activities you do and how many points you get for each. And I think that was very smart.
And then also not actually showing the points but showing the results of points, so showing things like, I have five photos and you have three. That communicates or expresses that that person has been more active or more involved in the system without saying this person has 73 points and you only have 62, whatever it is.
Jared: It's interesting to me because there's a lot of stuff that we can leverage this with because really, if we think of design as Robert Fabricant likes to call it, the medium for design is behavior.
You're really talking about getting at behavior at a much higher level than just pushing a button or checking check box. You're really diving into what drives us to have fun, what drives us to stay interested, what drives us to keep engaged in something that otherwise we might get distracted from or pulled away from.
Stephen: That's exactly it. [laughs] That's exactly it. And I think that's where I've ended up in my maturity as a designer. My background, if we go back to the late '90s, it was actually web design, graphic design, visual design.
But there's some point where you start thinking or where you start transitioning from, OK, I like this color, this is what I like, to what does the business owner like, to what is more effective, what's going to work with our audience. And so you learn very quickly to judge the quality of your work by how effective it is. Are people able to click to through it and use it? Is it usable? Is it useful? Those types of things.
But I think, this is my personal opinion here, I think for a lot of the usability ideas that were unknown a decade ago, we were still exploring and figuring out what works. If you roll the clock forward now we have a lot of patterns. For example, a login form. We know what a usable login form looks like.
So for me, the exciting thing is we know what a usable login form looks like. Well what about a seductive login form? What makes people want to fill out those fields? If you have extra information to ask, like you need to ask for additional fields, more so than other people, what makes it fun to do so? What makes it interesting to do so?
And so that actually, maybe it's out of boredom [laughs] with where I've come from. But when you start talking about behavior and motivation, inspiration, I think that's a well we could mine for decades to come and still be nowhere nearer to understanding because essentially we're talking about how the human brain works, how humans respond to things, and that gets into emotions and behaviors and motivations and these things we've been talking about for thousands of years.
Jared: Well I think that's right. I've ran into the same sort of thing. I starting thinking... Most of my early career thinking about building usable systems had to do about eliminating frustration. And I kept looking at it and thinking, "OK, so when we've eliminated all of the frustration, are we done?"
And what I realized was that when you eliminate all frustration from a system, you have something that is no longer frustrating, but it's not that interesting either.
Stephen: Exactly. [laughs]
Jared: And so there is an additional dimension, which in my mind is the other side of the scale from frustration, which is delight.
What you're talking about here is ways to design for delight, and ways to in some ways detect when delight is missing, and look for opportunities to put it into the applications that we're building.
Stephen: Exactly. In fact, I like to use this example. There's a sign at one of the restaurants we go to, and instead of saying, "Don't park here or you'll be towed," the familiar, let's call it usable message, they actually have a very tongue in cheek message talking about how your car will be demolished and squashed into a small box by a monster if you park here.
It's fine and we laugh, but it's also usable at the same time. And I think that's what I try to aim for because there's definitely the other extreme where you have something that's really delightful and fun, but it's a little bit awkward and you're not sure how to use it. And actually, in those cases it actually will affect the delight.
So one of the things I emphasize is we want to make sure it's still usable. People understand the message or the intent or how to interact with it, but now can we take it to the next level and make it delightful as well? Whether it's the language, or whether it's through what happens after you click that button, or the way you interact with it, or the way the information is collected.
I use the sign-up process for iLike as an example. If we think about most music sites, at some point in the registration process, most music sites will present you with an empty form field that says, "Tell us your favorite bands, separated by a comma."
Jared: Right.
Stephen: And so we start filling that in, and that's what's expected. What iLike does, which is very different, is they don't actually ever give you that option. In fact, they give you something different which first, before I even describe what they're doing, the fact that it's different engages our attention. It's a surprise. It's different from what we're used to.
So first off, they give you something that's not the form box. And then what they give you is actually a list of bands to choose from. And I could stop there and say "a list" and we think in our minds a check box, things like that. But it's actually a mosaic with pictures of the bands.
And just the idea that it's pictures versus lists is another technique. It's using visual imagery. And that's how our brains work...we think in pictures first so we can look and see the bands that we like. We're not having to read text. So we can actually process this much more quickly.
And then two, the fact that you might not see your favorite band right up front causes you to click more and hope that you will see it. And so it becomes a very playful experience.
And what I found was I went through 10 pages, which is where they cap you off at, clicking on these bands and clicking ones I like. And at the end, if you look at this from a business perspective, they learned from me about 35 bands that I like, out of I think 300 that they presented me with.
Compare that to the other music sites I've signed up with, where I might put in four or five bands that I like, with whatever's top of mind. Here I was able to give them a lot more data, which is currency for them.
And I had a delightful experience. I had a fun time just playing with the application and seeing, "All right, I clicked on more of this genre of bands on the previous page. Am I going to get more of that kind on the next page?" So this idea of feedback loops, visual imagery, recognition of recall.
They're showing me bands that I probably might not have brought to mind if you were just asking me to recall it, but instead I can just click on it and play the game, say, "I like that. That's fun." And convenience. I didn't have to type anything. I just clicked the mouse.
So they turned this part of the process into a very fun game, where I had a better experience and they got more data. And to me, that's what I'm talking about when I talk about seductive interactions.
Jared: That's interesting to me, because I had the same experience with Netflix and recommending movies, right?
Stephen: [laughs]
Jared: And going through and clicking off the movies and seeing what they would recommend based on the ratings I gave things. They have these little games where they say, "Well, tell us what you think of these two or three movies and we'll tell you, based on that, what we would recommend you watch."
And at first, it's like, "Oh, I've seen that. I've seen that." But after a while, they started recommending things I'd never heard of. And I'm sort of a movie buff. I'm like, "How come I haven't heard of this, and why do they think I would like it?"
And that really played into a lot of my engagement with the brand. It really sort of stuck, like, "Oh my gosh, they know things about movies." So I think of Netflix as a result of this. I think of Netflix as someone who I could get into a really geeky conversation about movies with, not just a website I rent things from.
Stephen: Exactly. In fact, I think I mentioned Netflix a couples times [laughs] for that very reason. And yeah, very similar to iLike. I think I lost--I don't know if lost is the right word, but I spent two and a half hours of my time, when I first signed up with Netflix, just poking around and playing with movies. I think, at the end of the two and a half hours, I had, I don't know, 215 movies I had rated. And I had a blast. It was fun for me.
And again, they learned what this profile, "Stephen Anderson," likes in movies, and that in turn feeds into their system, which makes it a better recommendation engine for the whole ecosystem. And that's exactly the kind of things I'm talking about. How can we make it really fun, really delightful, for users interacting with this site and with the application, and how can we get what we need to be successful as a business?
Jared: Great. Great. Well, I'm really looking forward to it. So if people want to be able to order these cards, they're not available yet, right?
Stephen: Correct. I am taking pre-orders, at this point.
Jared: OK.
Stephen: And the URL for that is getmentalnotes.com. And right now, you can just order from the site. You can also download the first seven cards, in the PDF format, from the site. Over the next few weeks, though, I'll also be sharing some of the content in advance of publication. So there's a wiki where I'll be sharing some of the content I've been writing.
Also, I have a Twitter account set up there, as well. And as I've been doing research, as I've been coming across different things online, or off-line, I've been tweeting about those so that everyone can kind of see the sources I'm going to, to produce these.
And the interesting part is, after I publish this deck, I could go on doing a series three, series four, [laughs] forever. I mean, it's research into human psychology and how humans work. And this stuff, while there's a lot of things that stay the same over time, there's also new findings every day.
Jared: Right. You mean we just don't run out of how the brain works? We just don't hit a border to that? That universe is expanding?
Stephen: [laughs] We haven't yet.
[laughter]
Stephen: And just in terms of research, you start off in one discipline, one field, and you end up expanding to others. So I started off focusing a lot on behavioral economics. A lot of the cards are from that field. But very quickly, I crossed over into game mechanics and things that game mechanics use. And of course, those are built on just a handful of things we know from psychology about motivation and incentives.
If you look at neuroscience, that's another area I focused on. A lot of the findings and a lot of the things I talk about, as far as how we relate to visual images or what delights us or what we find fun, comes from neuroscience.
And just recently, through the research, I've opened a whole new door into rhetoric, which is thousands of years old. But a lot of the ideas, when we talk about persuasion, particularly in our language and what we use, folks as far back as Aristotle were writing about this and giving us tips that, frankly, I haven't seen on a lot of websites but we could definitely use to motivate people or to frame things in a certain way.
So it's an endless black hole of information. At some point, for the cards, you have to stop and say, "OK, these are the first 50 cards." If there's interest, we can do more later, but these are 52 principles that I've found really useful, personally, on the projects I do, working with clients that I've worked with.
Jared: And I noticed, even on the site, you're using these techniques. I noticed that people who ordered the first hundred got it at the lowest price, and then the second hundred got it at a slightly higher price, and you're making the price go up every hundred orders. So people who order earlier get it cheaper than people who wait.
Stephen: Yeah. And there's two ways to look at it. One is, yeah, I'm using kind of the price scarcity there to encourage people to buy ahead of time. But on the other hand, and I try to be clear with this in the messaging, I really just want to reward the people who are supporting me in advance.
In fact, that's the whole idea. People are taking their money, buying a product that won't be out until the spring of 2010, so a few months from now. And so I want to reward them in some way for their support, and so giving a discount is the best way I could do it at this time. That was really my goal. So the first hundred people who ordered, which was back in September, well in advance of the product, got the thing at half off. So that was my goal.
Jared: It's very smart. It's very clever. Well, this is great. And of course, you're going to be talking about a lot of this stuff starting in San Diego at the Web App Masters Tour, right?
Stephen: Yes, I'm very excited to be doing that. It's going to be a little bit different variation on the seductive-interactions presentation I've been doing. I'm going to focus a little bit more on the gaming side, which I've actually been working with a couple clients, talking more specifically about game mechanics.
And also focus a little bit more on the enterprise, or you mentioned kind of the boring apps; can this stuff apply to the university admission forms or the insurance claim forms? And I believe, 100 percent, absolutely, that this can apply. I'll be sharing a few more examples along those lines, showing how these principles apply to everything and not just music sites or travel sites or things like that.
Jared: Fabulous! Well, I'm very excited and looking forward to seeing you there, and it'll be great to have you along. We're going to be in San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle this spring and summer. And you can find out more about that at uietour.com, which is where we're talking about the Web App Masters Tour. And then your site, where people can find out more about your work is poetpainter.com, correct?
Stephen: That is correct.
Jared: Excellent.
Stephen: I need some new blog posts, but I have several in the pipeline.
Jared: But they can see some of your presentations there?
Stephen: Correct, yeah. I list the presentations there. I actually have a link to my SlideShare presentations, where I have everything, going back five years, of my presentations, as well as five years of blog posts leading up to this point.
Jared: Fabulous. Well, Stephen, I'm very much looking forward to this. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Thank you for spending the time with us today, and we'll talk soon.
Stephen: Thank you. I'm looking forward to the tour.
Jared: Excellent. And to all of our listeners, I want to thank you for spending the time with us and, once again, thank you for encouraging our behavior. That's all for now. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.
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Don't forget Stephen will join us at the UIE Web App Masters Tour. Find out more about the whole show at